Famous quotes by Composers

"Sorrowful and great is the artist's destiny"

Franz Liszt, Composer

"Life is only a long and bitter suicide, and faith alone can transform this suicide into a sacrifice"

Franz Liszt, Composer

"Companions, in misery and worse, that is what we all are, and to try to change this substantially avails us nothing"

Franz Liszt, Composer

"The principal task of a conductor is not to put himself in evidence but to disappear behind his functions as much as possible. We are pilots, not servants"

Franz Liszt, Composer

"It is my fervent wish and my greatest ambition to leave a work with a few useful instructions for the pianists after me"

Franz Liszt, Composer

"The music of the Gypsies belongs in the sphere of improvisation rather than in any other, without which it would have no power to exist"

Franz Liszt, Composer

"Supreme serenity still remains the Ideal of great Art. The shapes and transitory forms of life are but stages toward this Ideal, which Christ's religion illuminates with His divine light"

Franz Liszt, Composer

"I conclude that the Wagnerian operas, which are already in the repertoire, and other masterworks as well, stand in no further need of my services"

Franz Liszt, Composer

"Real men are sadly lacking in this world, for when they are put to the test they prove worthless"

Franz Liszt, Composer

"I find little in the works of Beethoven, Berlioz, Wagner and others when they are led by a conductor who functions like a windmill"

Franz Liszt, Composer

"I did not compose my work as one might put on a church vestment... Rather it sprung from the truly fervent faith of my heart, such as I have felt it since my childhood"

Franz Liszt, Composer

"A theatre receives recognition through its initiative, which is indispensable for first-rate performances"

Franz Liszt, Composer

"You might lose your spontaneity and, instead of composing first-rate Gershwin, end up with second rate Ravel"

Maurice Ravel, Composer

"The only love affair I have ever had was with music"

Maurice Ravel, Composer

"I am not one of the great composers. All the great have produced enormously. There is everything in their work - the best and the worst, but there is always quantity. But I have written relatively little"

Maurice Ravel, Composer

"Why does God endow us with compassion?"

Franz Schubert, Composer

"If only your pure and clean mind could touch me, dear Haydn, nobody has a greater reverence for you than I have"

Franz Schubert, Composer

"I try to decorate my imagination as much as I can"

Franz Schubert, Composer

"Music, I feel, must be emotional first and intellectual second"

Maurice Ravel, Composer

"I was never a quick writer, but composed with great care and efforts"

Joseph Haydn, Composer

"The greatest misfortune of the wise man and the greatest unhappiness of the fool are based upon convention"

Franz Schubert, Composer

"I am composing like a god, as if it simply had to be done as it has been done"

Franz Schubert, Composer

"Happy is the man who finds a true friend, and far happier is he who finds that true friend in his wife"

Franz Schubert, Composer

"Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down"

Hector Berlioz, Composer

"The luck of having talent is not enough; one must also have a talent for luck"

Hector Berlioz, Composer

"We should always remember that sensitiveness and emotion constitute the real content of a work of art"

Maurice Ravel, Composer

"Remember that I wrote a pavane for a dead princess, and not a dead pavane for a princess!"

Maurice Ravel, Composer

"You believe happiness to be derived from the place in which, once you have been happy, but in truth it is centered in ourselves"

Franz Schubert, Composer

"Why should the composer be more guilty than the poet who warms to fantasy by a strange flame, making an idea that inspires him the subject of his own very different treatment?"

Franz Schubert, Composer

"The manager is to be blamed who distributes parts to his players which they are unable to act"

Franz Schubert, Composer

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